Eight trucks carrying MH17 wreckage arrive in Netherlands

After six long nights driving across Europe, from Ukraine to the German-Dutch border, the convoy of eight trucks carrying the wreckage of Flight MH17 covered the final leg of its journey in daylight on Tuesday – a solemn, almost eerie, sight, recalling the repatriation of the dead last summer.

There was no ceremony to mark the arrival of the convoy at the nondescript air force base at Gilze-Rijen, southeast of Rotterdam. There were no royals or politicians. Just a huddle of silent relatives waiting to see, for the first time, what was left of the aircraft in which their loved ones died.

The afternoon light was already starting to fade as the first of the orange trucks came trundling down the country road, with another, then another, behind it. All were marked “MH17 Recovery” and numbered one to eight. Other than that, there was no indication of the cargo they carried.

Within three or four minutes, the police motorcycle outriders had peeled away, the lorries were out of sight, and, having witnessed another stage in the investigation they hope will ultimately apportion blame for the deaths of the 298 passengers and crew last July, the relatives began to disperse.

The international investigation into who shot down the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17th is being led by the Dutch Safety Board, and the arrival of the wreckage represents its best – and perhaps final – hope of recovering evidence of what happened.

Missile fire

Washington, supported by “unambiguous findings” by German intelligence in October, says pro-Russian rebels fighting in eastern Ukraine hit the plane with a surface-to-air missile, while – in the worst confrontation since the cold war – Russia says the missile was fired by a Ukrainian fighter jet.

Because the wreckage and any secrets it yields may end up at the centre of criminal proceedings, a sealed aircraft hangar has been prepared where the components will be unloaded, photographed, scanned and categorised, down to the last nut and bolt, before the examination begins.

Experts will then piece together what they can of the jet on a specially constructed frame – a hugely complex task not least because much of the fuselage was destroyed or badly damaged by fire.

“Of course there are also some parts missing,” says the head of the Safety Board, Tjibbe Joustra. “We know that they are missing and, in the circumstances, we feel we can be more than satisfied with the amount of wreckage we have managed to recover.”

Mr Joustra says it will take “several months” to complete the reconstruction – and a final report on the cause of the crash is not expected until mid-2015.

Some relatives are already angry at the length of time it took investors to reach the crash site in Ukraine, at the fact that no suspects have been identified, and at the prospect that the final report could still take up to another year.

A letter sent to the prime minister, Mark Rutte, last Friday by a group of 20 relatives from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the United States, alleges that the Dutch have “mishandled” the investigation – and calls for the appointment of a United Nations special envoy to take over.

The relatives have retained specialist law firm, Van der Goen, which represented victims of the Afriqiyah Airways crash in Tripoli in 2010, the El Al jet crash in Amsterdam in 1992, and the Pan Am-KLM crash in the Canary Islands in 1977.

“Nobody knows who is doing what” claimed Bob van der Goen, a partner with the firm. “There is no co-ordination, no leadership whatsoever by the Netherlands.”